Why women still can’t have it all and other stories you should not have missed on the web this week

Why Women Still Can’t Have It All
It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.

There are two stories of the birth of the euro: an “immaculate” conception and a worldly one. The latter is, as one would expect, rather more exciting. Although the idea of a European monetary union had been floated by Eurocrats in the 1970s and ’80s, in the belief that it would hasten European economic and political integration, the key moment occurred on Dec. 8, 1989. The Berlin Wall had just collapsed. With West Germany pressing for almost immediate German reunification the traditional balance of power inside the European Community was threatened. Keen to avoid what he perceived as an excessively resurgent Germany, the late French president François Mitterrand preconditioned his support of German reunification on the swift adoption of a common currency. Why? Because it would dilute German sovereignty.

Major banks are getting rich from money laundered by violent Mexican drug gangs, whistleblower says. As the body count from Mexico’s drug war passes 50,000, public beheadings have become commonplace. Cartels have gunned down teenagers at house parties, massacred dozens of migrants on rural ranches and torched urban casinos. In the current climate of violence and impunity, financial analysts say there is no hyperbole in accusing bankers of laundering blood money for international assassins.

Microsoft isn’t going to let Windows 8 fail because the hardware it runs on isn’t ambitious enough, and it apparently doesn’t trust the major PC manufacturers to do the job. After 31 years of writing software for other companies’ computers, it’s building its own PCs, its own way. Even if Surface doesn’t work out, it’s a moment of enormous significance for the company and the industry.

If the whole world had the same proportion of overweight and obese people as America, its biomass would rise by 20%. If the populations of other countries adopted the pattern of weight distribution found in the United States, the world’s biomass would rise by 20%—roughly equivalent to adding an extra 1 billion average-sized people. This would create all kinds of strains, not least on the world’s food supply.